Mitt Romney visits Quakertown Wawa, just not the one with the crowd of supporters and protesters

A Wawa may never have been the sight of so much political heat before today.

There were more than a hundred people outside of a Wawa in Quakertown today. There were Tea Party activists and 99-percenters. Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and other members of the Democratic party spoke.

But nowhere to be found was presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, despite a scheduled campaign stop.

Romney instead went miles away to two less-crowded Wawas in Quakertown.

Romney told The AP he avoided the first Wawa because of Rendell.

"Why we're at this Wawa, instead of the other Wawa?" Romney said as he paid for a meatball hoagie, the AP reports. "I
understand I had a surrogate over there already, so we decided to pick a
different place. My surrogate is former Gov. Rendell, who said we could
win Pennsylvania."

Romney spent about 20 minutes at each of two other Wawas in Quakertown but never arrived at the one where campaign representatives had set up a microphone for him.

"I'm a little disappointed, and I don't know what happened," said a Quakertown resident who brought her son.

During the initial confusion, Romney campaign representatives were not returning calls and Wawa representatives knew only rumors, and it wasn't clear how Romney missed his scheduled stop.

Romney was scheduled to speak at 12:40 p.m.

By 1:30 p.m., about 90 minutes of back-and-forth shouts about whether President Barack Obama or Romney is the better candidate had quieted down and Wawa workers explained that Romney went to another locaiton.

No one from the Romney campaign told the crowd Romney wasn't coming, but the crowd began to disperse.

"He avoided the protesters, but his supporters were there waiting for him," said Julie Blust, of Pennsylvania Working Families, one group demonstrating against Romney. "They came out and waited, some of them three hours."

Romney is on a campaign tour aimed at undecided voters in six pivotal
states won by Obama four years ago: New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa.

Romney started his day with a stop in Weatherly, Pa., visited the two Quakertown Wawas and then was due at the Cornwall Iron Furnace in Cornwall, Pa., for a speech at 5:15 p.m.

Romney and partners founded Bain Capital, one of the country's top private equity firms, in 1984. The company is a huge manager of pension funds for public pensions such as the California State Teachers Retirement System.

He left Bain in 1999, but many anti-Romney ads have focused around his time with the company and its practice of buying and restructuring major companies such as Houghton Mifflin and Toys 'R' Us.